Ward’s Director Bush to Retire in January

Bush led Wardrsquos into digital age

Ward’s Managing Director Jim Bush, who guided the automotive-information company’s transition into the digital age, will retire effective Jan. 15.

Sue Boehlke, vice president at Ward’s parent Penton, says a replacement will be named in coming months.

Bush directed all Ward’s paid subscription products for a half-dozen years, before adding responsibility for the company’s advertising business and becoming the group’s managing director in 2005. Under his stewardship, the company in 2001 launched its highly successful WardsAuto.com subscription-based website, which has won numerous awards over the years for editorial content and overall excellence.

“Jim is the rock on which today’s Ward’s is built,” Boehlke says. “He saw where information publishing was headed long before many of his competitors and navigated some pretty tricky waters to take Ward’s where it needed to go.

“Thanks to Jim, we now have a firm foundation and a solid game plan that ensures Ward’s will continue to grow while providing the auto industry with the vital strategic information for which the Ward’s brand has become so well known. He will be missed greatly.”

Bush joined the firm in 1981 as a reporter for Ward’s AutoWorld and rose through several positions to become the monthly magazine’s editor in 1986. Over the next several years he went on to edit other Ward’s publications, including Ward’s Automotive International and Ward’s Automotive Reports, before moving to the business side of the company in 1992, first as publisher of its database products.

“Despite Jim’s diploma from Michigan State, I hired him and soon learned he was a quick study,” says Dave Smith, current Ward’s AutoWorld editor at large and a University of Michigan graduate. “Whatever assignment I gave him he always performed well and he quickly moved up the ladder. His career always included posts where his journalistic and leadership skills proved valuable to the Ward’s brand.”

Prior to landing at Ward’s, Bush covered state government and politics as Capitol bureau chief of the Panax group of Michigan newspapers. He also was a reporter at The Macomb Daily (Michigan) and a northern Michigan weekly newspaper.

Bush says he has no grand plan for what’s next, but will take some time to reconnect with life outside the automotive information business. “I have three grandchildren and a fourth on the way, and I’m going to spend as much time as I can with them,” he says. “But I’ve got this business in my blood, and I hope to stay involved in some way.”

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